Neurologist Reveals The TOP FOODS & Daily Hacks To PREVENT ALZHEIMER'S | David Perlmutter

Globally, what's killing people more than anything else are called chronic degenerative conditions. There is one mechanism at the root of each and every one of these conditions: inflammation. So here I am practicing neurology, interacting with families on a daily basis, dealing with their parents, their husbands, their wives, their loved ones suffering from Alzheimer's and right across the parking lot was my father in a nursing home, a brilliant brain surgeon now dying of Alzheimer's disease. So I really got accustomed to what Alzheimer's was all about from a professional perspective, but also from a very personal perspective as well and realized that it really was a calling to do the best I could to get the word out that this isn't something that just happens. It's not necessarily genetic. that we determine to a significant degree what our brains are going to be like as we move forward as we age. There's so much discussion these days about the so-called Alzheimer's gene. It's called the APOE4 gene. And people think, well, if I have it, I'm basically in bad shape, nothing I can do. And if I don't have it, I'm scot-free. I have nothing to worry about. And absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. It turns out that if you do carry this ApoE4 allele, which is something you can determine by having one of these online genetic tests that you can order, that you are at increased risk, that's for sure. But it pales in comparison to what you can do to offset your risk by doing things related to your lifestyle choices, reducing your simple carbohydrate consumption, engaging in regular aerobic exercise, making sure that your sleep is restorative, managing your stress, taking a vitamin D supplement, using other supplements like turmeric and DHA from fish oil, for example, are associated with a dramatic reduction in risk that can absolutely offset the risk that you might have if you carry the gene. And again, as I mentioned, you can get Alzheimer's even if you don't carry that gene. Two reasons. First, there are other genes that increase risk. We know, for example, one called the presenilin 1 gene is associated with an increased risk. But in addition, if you choose to become a type 2 diabetic, for example, you may have quadrupled your risk for Alzheimer's, a disease for which there is no pharmaceutical treatment whatsoever. And becoming a type 2 diabetic is related to the foods that you eat. And that really puts a lot of emphasis on making the right food choices if you want to do your very best to prevent this again, a disease for which there is no treatment affecting 5.4 million Americans, your risk for that disease is 50/50 if you live to be age 85 years. I think genetic testing is very important, well beyond the Alzheimer's story. It's really good to know how you metabolize and utilize various forms of vitamins, what your reaction to drugs, for example, may be. So I think it's very reasonable these days to know as much as you can about yourself so you can hack your own biology and live a healthier life. So I think that's really very valuable information. When we look at data from the World Health Organization, we realize now, this day, globally, what's killing people more than anything else are called chronic degenerative conditions. It's not an infection, it's not war, it's not some new virus that has mutated. It's chronic degenerative conditions, things like Alzheimer's. coronary artery disease, diabetes, and even cancer. And what we understand about these diseases is they are united in terms of their mechanism. There is one mechanism at the root of each and every one of these conditions that again represents the number one cause of death on planet Earth and that mechanism is inflammation. So inflammation has two sides. Acute inflammation might be the inflammation that you might experience after a mosquito bite or after you fall and hurt yourself and break your arm. That inflammation is involved in clearing debris and getting rid of organisms and helping speed the healing process. But when that inflammation becomes chronic or ongoing over a period of time, it is a fire that needs to be put out. In fact, that's where the word comes from, inflammation in flammare means to light on fire. and that is the root of these conditions. Alzheimer's is a prototypic inflammatory disorder. Alzheimer's is inflammation of the brain, like Parkinson's is inflammation of the brain. So we have to do everything we can to recognize that, not necessarily in terms of treatment, but in terms of the front end. What can we do? What kind of life can we live to reduce inflammation and reduce our chances of developing one of these issues. New research demonstrates that when you look at markers in the blood of inflammation in people in their 30s and then follow these people up three decades later, those individuals in their 30s and 40s that had higher levels of inflammation markers in their blood have a dramatic increased risk developing Alzheimer's disease. What does that mean? It means that this message about Alzheimer's disease and its prevention is something that 20 and 30 and 40 year olds need to be listening to. When people now notice that their cognitive function is declining, that their memory resources are declining, that their ability to plan for the future is declining, that's almost too late. There is a There are important things that can be done. But, you know, John Kennedy said that the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. And that causes us to focus on the central role of prevention as it relates to Alzheimer's disease. Again, a disease for which there is no treatment. We live in a world that manifests what is called negativity bias. We are really coerced into looking at everything really from a negative perspective. look at the news, look at what we see on television, everything is really focused on painting a negative picture. We are given ideals that we think we need to live up to and as such never have achieved a sense of total worth because the ideals that we feel we need to live up to are unachievable. When we look at people's selfies, they're always having the best time and always seeming happy when in reality we know that that isn't necessarily true, that there is adversity in everyone's life. I think that it's very important not to look at whether the glass is half full or half empty, but recognize moment to moment that the glass is absolutely overflowing. We live in the best time ever for humanity. We have a time when there is the least amount of war that we have resources that we've never had before, but into each life some rain must fall. We will all face adversity. And that's part of the script. The question is how do you deal with it? When you recognize that adversity is to be expected, that our parents will die, that other things can happen to our children, to ourselves, when we recognize that and embrace that, and try our very best to be one with that emotion, step aside from it, but experience what that emotion is like, we recognize it's all part of the play. It's all part of the play that is written for each and every one of us. We're all going to experience adversity, but the more we inculcate that into our being, the worse it is for us on a physical, emotional, spiritual basis. So we have to recognize that we're going to have these events happen The question is, now that events have happened, what do you choose to do with that event? I think it's reasonable to experience it to its depths, to its deepest level of pain possible, but then let it go. Because it does not serve you to continue to machinate over this devastating experience that each and every one of us will experience. I think that mindset is fundamental because When we look at the term mind set, it connotes that it has no ability to change. The mind is set. And as such, I think the message needs to be that you can absolutely change your mind. That the mind is very plastic, meaning it can be changed. The more we deal with adversity and focus on adversity, the more our minds will be open to adversity and open to negativity. Through what is called neuroplasticity, we can rewire the mind. We can change our outlook and we can see the world as a better place. When we do that, when we distance ourselves from acting impulsively, from acting out of fear, acting from what is called the amygdala part of the brain, we then rekindle our connection to a more sophisticated part of the brain that defines us as human beings. we call that the prefrontal cortex. And this is the part of the brain that deals with empathy and compassion and understanding the feelings of other people and most importantly, perhaps, planning for the future and executive function, meaning changing our actions moment to moment for the better. So the idea of having a mindset is, to me, important to understand that we can change that. and then we can reinforce a condition of the mind that is positive and allows us to see the world in a better place and allows us to conduct ourselves in such a way as to rewire the brain for those attributes of empathy and compassion. When we first published the original version of Grain Brain back in 2013, Grain Brain was looked upon as being very disruptive. very happy to say that because that's a great place to be because we need plenty of disruption because if we don't then we are forcing ourselves to accept what is called the status quo and we can do better than the status quo. The term status quo Ronald Reagan said is Latin for the mess we're in and we can do better. So Grain Brain originally focused on the need to lower our refined carbohydrates talked about the damaging effects on the immune function and the brain of gluten, for example. And since that time five years ago, we've been really bolstered by a large amount of wonderful scientific literature that has really demonstrated that indeed it's not our dietary fat that is making us unhealthy. It is our consumption of sugar and other refined carbohydrates that is central in terms of increasing this mechanism called inflammation that underscores all of our chronic degenerative conditions including Alzheimer's disease. So the degree of validation that Grain Brain has received over the past five years has been really encouraging, very validating for us in terms of the work that we do. I think that moving forward what the future holds in terms of that validation we will see. But I think that there's a wave now of lowering our carbohydrates, welcoming healthful fat back to the table. And with the addition of Brain Maker, which looked at our gut bacteria and the role that our gut bacteria are playing in terms of determining our health, moving forward recognizing the importance of fermented foods and what we call prebiotic fiber to nurture the gut bacteria, to lower inflammation, to set an environment that's good for the brain, good for the immune system. I think there's a groundswell of information in this science now that where it goes, who knows. But we see such popularity in both the lay and in the professional press that we're really going to a better place. Now when I talk about eating healthier fat or more healthful fat to be grammatically correct, it's interesting to look at some of the studies that are coming out these days that are challenging that. One of them had to do with consumption of eggs or other dietary sources of cholesterol. And this study was really quite interesting because it concluded rather that all cause mortality as well as cardiovascular related issues were increased in people who either consumed more eggs or consumed diets that were higher in cholesterol. And I think the conclusions that were reached are interesting and should be looked at. We welcome all science. But I think that when we talk about consuming eggs or high cholesterol foods like meat and other forms of, for example, seafood, we have to recognize that quality is really very important. that eggs in general that you might buy at the grocery store may well be of low quality, may be threatening to your health for a number of reasons. There is no alchemy that takes place when we feed chickens garbage and expect them to produce an egg that's going to be good for us. I believe that eating organically raised eggs where the yolk is really orange-yellow, you can tell the difference, I can't imagine that that is necessarily going to be threatening to health. I happen to think it's a good food. I think that sources of cholesterol from good sources that you recognize as being quality, grass-fed beef for example, if you choose to eat beef, wild seafood as opposed to farm-raised seafood, are very reasonable and part of your diet. But I would say to be fair that we need to to follow this literature. We can't just throw out literature because it doesn't suit our perspectives. And I think to be open-minded is again demonstrating taking somebody else's point of reference for a moment and seeing what it's like to walk a mile in somebody else's shoes. That's a manifestation of using your prefrontal cortex and not acting impulsively. I think it's really good to keep an open mind and see what the future holds. In terms of really good research, I do believe that gluten does represent a threat to human health and I think that is a threat to all humans. It doesn't mean that the world comes crashing to an end if you happen to have a piece of bread, obviously that's not reality. But I think the research clearly indicates that gluten does tend to pose a threat to the integrity of the gut lining and that turns out to be very important. The gut lining is a very important regulator of a lot of things in human physiology including inflammation and some people respond much more negatively than others. People for example with celiac disease which only represents about 1.4% of our population have a dramatic autoimmune reaction when they are exposed to gluten containing foods. But we do know that there are a large number of people who have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. And that might be 20, 30, 40% of the population who may have manifestations, physical manifestations from consuming gluten. And what's really important to understand is that these problems from eating gluten may not necessarily involve the gastrointestinal system. What does that mean? It means they may not have gut related issues when they consume gluten. They may have skin irritation, rashes, joint pain, headaches, even cognitive issues from gluten consumption. So I think people even without celiac disease should consider going gluten free or at least doing their very best to reduce their gluten consumption. And to be clear, what I am not saying is shop the gluten free aisle in the grocery store. That would be a bad recommendation. Why? Because I think this is something everyone should do. Walk down the gluten-free aisle and what do you see? You see crap. You see gluten-free cupcakes and cake mix and pie crusts and bread and you name it. And yes, it's gluten-free. Does that mean I can go and eat all I want? No, it doesn't mean that at all. These are high refined carbohydrate foods that absolutely need to be avoided because that plays into inflammation. again, a very important central theme as it relates to brain degeneration. So I think the gluten-free movement is here to stay. I think with good reason. And I'm pleased that, you know, years ago, again, our description of why gluten-free was important in grain brain was very disruptive. It's not disruptive anymore because people are really embracing this. In 2018, the ketogenic diet was the number one search term on Google in terms of health, and with good reason. We know that a ketogenic diet is a diet that reduces inflammation. That's our major goal in terms of health. This is a diet that plays a huge role in regulating how effective insulin is in the human body. It's a diet that's proven effective in terms of being healthful for the brain. New research shows that the ketogenic diet is extremely helpful with respect to Parkinson's disease. disease. We've known for a long, long time that it can help seizures, it can be helpful with respect to any number of inflammatory conditions including joint pain, but I think perhaps most importantly and the reason it's getting so much traction these days is it's a really handy way of losing weight and that's, you know, in a country where 70% of adults are either overweight or obese, that's very important. And it's a diet, ketogenic diet that is really relatively new. I mean, this is a diet that humans have experienced only for about the past two million years. So this is really a relatively new experience for us. It's only been two million years that we've been able to realize that this is the diet that has kept humans alive and healthy. So it's a diet that's focused on consuming higher levels of good fats, and significantly reducing refined carbohydrates and obviously sugar in any of its forms. And I don't mean just white refined sugar. I mean things that people might believe are healthful like honey, even if it's organic, or maple syrup, or these other forms of sugar that people think, well, I'm not eating sugar, I'm eating these and these are good for me. No. It's also, I think, a diet that is a bit confusing for people. and that people may have issues with on the front end if they're not careful. I think the two areas that need to be ranked in terms of being important for people wanting to engage this very healthful diet, the ketogenic diet, are number one, when you cut your carbohydrates, make sure you're not throwing out dietary fiber. By definition, dietary fiber is a carbohydrate, but going low carb might cause people to think therefore no fiber rich vegetables. Bad idea. So we've got to focus on net carbs. That's the total carbs but you subtract out the fiber rich vegetables that we want to include. The other area that people have issues with on the ketogenic diet seems to be electrolytes, things like potassium and magnesium. When your body is producing these ketone bodies that it produces once it starts to metabolize fat. These ketone bodies tend to accumulate in the blood and ultimately in the urine and draw out the electrolytes so people can have issues. So supplementing with magnesium and potassium is often a way to offset what has become known as the keto flu which would cause some people to want to abandon going on the ketogenic diet. From my perspective, Ketogenic diet has proven its efficacy in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. We know that early on, before people have the clinical manifestations of Alzheimer's, in other words, the cognitive and executive function issues that are manifestations of declining brain function, that their brains are actually demonstrating on sophisticated PET scanning the inability to use glucose or sugar as a fuel source in specific Alzheimer's related areas. And what is interesting is that even in the Alzheimer's patient, you can override those deficits when you supply ketones. These areas light up again and start working. But I want to make one very, very important point. These PET scans that demonstrate these metabolic problems in the brain, inability to utilize glucose, are present 20-30 years before people begin to have cognitive decline. We institute changes in the brain in terms of its metabolism. We pave the way for this to happen when we have higher levels of blood sugar day in and day out. That compromises the function of insulin in the human body and we then become resistant to insulin, what we call insulin resistance. And that is a harbinger for Alzheimer's disease. We become insulin resistant when we eat sugar and we eat refined carbohydrates. So again, this is a message for the 20 year olds and the 30 year olds and the adolescents and the children that the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining and cut the carbs now net carbs, and eat more healthful fat. One of the richest sources of medium chain triglycerides, which is one of the body's great ways of making ketones to get you into ketosis, is human breast milk. Who knew? So children, babies rather, up until about six months, are in this ketosis that we talk about. So when does it start? I think newborns on should have plenty of ketones floating around in their bloodstreams until those newborns become about 95 and then maybe we'll have a discussion at that point. But a ketogenic diet is the diet that humans have been on as long as we've walked this planet and it's only been in the last blink of an eye that suddenly with the development of agriculture and much more recently the ability that we've developed to refine carbohydrates and make sugar that the human diet has changed so radically. And now we see the effects of shifting from a diet that was based on primarily protein and fat to a diet that's based on refined carbohydrates. Look around, look around what's going on from a planetary perspective in terms of global health. One of the more popular ways of getting into ketosis is something called fasting. Now, that's an open-ended term. Does that mean putting off breakfast until noon or 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon? So you haven't eaten since dinner the night before? That's a form of a fast and that does indeed raise your ketones in your blood. Does it mean fasting for three days? Does it mean fasting for 40 days? as Jesus did prior to his public ministry. Is it the fast of Yom Kippur? Is it the fast of Ramadan? These are all different types of fasting that cultures have engaged in for a long, long time. We now know that there happens to be a bit of a difference between getting on a ketogenic diet to develop ketones in your blood or developing ketones in your blood from engaging in a fast. which will certainly raise ketones in your blood but does more. What more does it do? What we don't get from being on a ketogenic diet but we do get from fasting is the amplification of the body's ability to clear out debris. We call this autophagy where we actually, auto means self, phagy means to eat. That doesn't sound very pleasant but what we're doing is amplifying the body's ability to find senescent or aging cells and activate pathways to rid the body of those cells. Very important. We also activate a process called mitophagy and what is that all about? That's the body's ability to rid itself of defective mitochondria. These are the energy producing parts within the cell. We also activate with fasting, what is called mitochondrial biogenesis, sounds great and that is the body's ability to grow new energy producing parts of the cell again called the mitochondria. So I think balancing between being on a ketogenic diet and using fasting from time to time is really a good way to get the best of all worlds. Back in medical school we were told that We didn't have the ability to grow new brain cells. We were told that, you know, you had a fixed number of brain cells by the time you were 18, and that was pretty much it. Then every beer that you drank was 20,000 brain cells and everything was on the skids pretty much for the rest of your life. We've learned, however, through the work of Dr. Ericsson, that we do retain the ability to grow new brain cells. A term neurogenesis is applied to that. throughout our lifetimes and specifically in areas that really matter, most important of which is an area called the hippocampus that has been called the memory center of the brain. And why that's important is the hippocampus is one of the primary targets, for example, of Alzheimer's disease and we get a second chance. Neurogenesis, we can grow new brain cells. So the obvious question would be, well, how can we amplify that process? what can we do right now to turn on brain cell growth? And it means you have to buy something. You have to buy something right now and that is a new pair of running shoes or sneakers or whatever it takes to get you to do more exercise. You've got to step up your exercise. You need about 20 to 30 minutes of something aerobics, aerobic related, you know, probably six days a week, perhaps seven days a week. I think resistance training is also very good. We have talked in the past about the ketogenic diet, for example. That also turns on the creation of a chemical in the body like exercise called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and that is the miracle grow for the brain. That amplifies the growth of new brain cells. Now, what are some of the things beyond exercise that can enhance BDNF? and therefore give us a second chance at growing new brain cells. Well, we know that fish oil is effective, the DHA in fish oil. Turmeric, which is a spice used in Indian cooking, now has become very popular as a nutritional supplement. A whole coffee fruit extract or concentrate is available in health food stores and these are all ways to amplify the production, the gene activation, change the gene expression to make more BDNF in your body, target your brain cells, grow new brain cells. It's really a way that you can do stem cell therapy. You've heard about stem cell therapy, how important that is, how people are looking at it. Well, these cells that grow in your brain are actually stem cells. And you can amplify stem cell therapy in your brain today by putting on those sneakers and getting outside or on the treadmill, however it is you want to exercise, swim, walk, bike, whatever it takes to get your heart rate up. And I want to indicate that it's beyond just the growth of new brain cells that BDNF is important. BDNF actually increases what is called neuroplasticity and what is that? that is the ability that our brain cells have to connect to each other in community, to form new pathways. And that's really very important when we're trying to rewire the brain, like against negativity. When you want to offload the mindset, when we want to offload our connection to negativity, when we want to live a life that's less connected to the fear center, that's more connected to the prefrontal cortex, live a life that cares more about the other person, that is more connected to our neighbors, more connected to people in other countries, people who are different from us, more connected to the health of our planet. That is allowing our brain to reconnect to this area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, to become empathetic and compassionate, to understand the impact of our actions today, our behaviors today in terms of their long-term consequences. So we have a new book coming out called Brainwash and that will be out soon. This is a book that is centered on detoxifying our brains from this sense of impending doom and getting away a little bit from social media and narcissism and and selfies and Recognizing that what really matters is diversity and reconnection. Reconnection to the messages of our DNA, reconnection to the notion that we can change our DNA's messaging by changing our lifestyle choices, reconnecting to the messaging from our gut bacteria, our microbiome, reconnecting our brains to that good area of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, reconnecting to our neighbors, to our communities, to other countries, to diversity of peoples, and to the health of our planet. Our new book, Brainwash, which will be published in January of 2020, January the 14th, as a matter of fact, is a book that really talks about how toxic our current environment is. It's a book that I'm writing with another MD, Austin Perlmutter MD, our son, who knew. And it's a book that really gives us the tools to offload from our modern toxic environment. The negativity that surrounds all of us that we see on our social media, that we see on television and newspapers. The negativity that really is pervasive and is actually rewiring our brains to make us view the world negatively. We can change that and through neuroplasticity, using BDNF to increase our ability to reconnect the brain we can reconnect and tap into the prefrontal cortex and view the world in a positive way and understand how important it is to care about other people, for example, to understand how diversity begets resilience. That our ability to be resilient depends on our diversity and recognizing and embracing the differences that we see in other people and not reject those differences. so we're really looking forward to this book's publication because we think it's going to have a very big impact. I've often been asked what would be my number one nutritional supplement and I would say exercise. Now I get the opportunity to stretch the rules a little bit. I think exercise is the one thing that is so lacking in modern society in terms of the nutrition that we see. It's multifactorial. People are eating way too much in terms of sugar and refined carbohydrates. Not enough at all in terms of good fat. When we look at nutritional supplements, I think the most pervasive deficiencies in modern society have to do with both magnesium and vitamin D. Magnesium because people are generally not eating the foods that are rich in magnesium because those are mostly, for example, leafy green vegetables because magnesium is the central atom in the chlorophyll molecule. So if something is green, it's got a lot of magnesium in it. Vitamin D is something that we make when we are exposed to sunlight or we can get from consuming vitamin D rich foods like fish. But I think by and large in Western cultures we see really that vitamin D deficiency is pervasive. And vitamin D is not really even a vitamin, it's a hormone. It activates more than 800 pathways throughout the body, many of which are in the brain. And these are receptors that have to do with gene expression. So it's really very, very important. Plays actually a very huge role in reducing inflammation. And again, recognizing how important inflammation is in terms of being detrimental for the brain, explains why there's such a strong correlation between low levels of vitamin D and risk for Alzheimer's, and risk for ADHD, and risk for autism, and risk for Parkinson's. No question there's pushback in my ideology from mainstream medicine. I've had to enjoy that for the past 32 years because mainstream medicine really wants to maintain the status quo. There's a great quote from Maurice Maderling that I actually learned about when I went to visit my friend Ammar Bose, Bose Audio. He made headphones and things like that. It was on the glass door going into his office. And it says, At every crossroads on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is confronted by a thousand men appointed to defend the past. People are not comfortable with change. And yet change, if looked upon as leading to something better, is absolutely something we should embrace. It's called progress. So when I am eccentric, not part of the middle of the bell curve, that's a good thing. I want to continue to be there. Am I always right about my contentions? Absolutely not. Have I been wrong about things in the past? You bet. Twenty years ago I was saying eat a low-fat diet. Who knew? like everybody else. But I think it's important to be open to new ideas and when you find new ideas, vet them as diligently as you can and then make them known. Around the world, my message has generally been embraced. Grain Brain and my books are in 35 languages, many of which I have difficulty even identifying when I receive a copy of a book. I think that everybody around the world wants to be healthy and now really understands that lifestyle choices matter a whole heck of a lot. When we see sudden increases in chronic degenerative conditions and other issues that are clearly not genetic, we have to turn to our lifestyle choices as being responsible. We call this nature versus nurture. Nature being our genes, our DNA, nurture being how we take care of ourselves, how we nurture our bodies. And I think that globally people are recognizing that they're not satisfied with what's happening to their populations and even from a cost perspective countries are really starting to embrace the notion that it matters a whole heck of a lot. I had the opportunity last year to speak to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank about these ideas. That lecture that I gave was simulcasted to 50 locations around the world. And I think people really embraced it because from an economic perspective, we can do better. We don't have to have soaring rates of Alzheimer's disease like we have. Again, 5.4 million cases here in America. that is unnecessary. I think by and large these chronic degenerative conditions are preventable and our mission is to get out the message, get out the information which turns into empowerment in terms of what really matters, what that messaging should be, so people can then choose their lifestyle choices based upon what their best understanding can be and that's our mission. Depression is an under-recognized problem here in America. You know, we live in a country where there are 47,000 suicides every year and by and large these are related to depression. So in a very real way, it's a life-threatening condition. We now understand that depression is an inflammatory disorder. It is a consequence of inflammation to a significant degree. and that relates to our lifestyle choices. We know, for example, that a diet higher in sugar will raise blood sugar. So there's a correlation, for example, between average blood sugar, hemoglobin A1c that we see advertised on the television, and risk for depression. Hemoglobin A1c is hemoglobin protein bound to sugar and is used commonly as an average measurement of blood sugar. but make no mistake about it, it's a powerful marker of inflammation as well. When our proteins bind sugar, when our blood sugar is elevated, it triggers an immune response that turns on the production of inflammatory chemicals and that explains its relationship then between depression and higher levels of A1C. The trick is to offload inflammation. How do you do that? You do that with dietary changes that reduce sugar consumption, that reduce the consumption of refined carbohydrates, that welcome dietary fat, good dietary fat back to the table. I am not talking about the grocery store shelf vegetable oils that are high in pro-inflammatory omega-6s. I'm talking about things like avocado oil, olive oil, nuts and seeds, for example. Fat is your friend, provided it's healthful fat. Let me tell you what a day of eating looks like for me. Typically when I'm home and have control over everything, I don't eat until about 12 or 1 o'clock in the afternoon. So therefore, I have extended this fast from whenever I finish dinner, which is probably about 6:30 p.m. Till 12 or 1 o'clock the next day. I also try to make sure that I finish eating at least three hours before I go to sleep. So there's a block of time that I eat and we call that time restriction. restricted eating. And it turns out that that plays really quite nicely with the way our biological clocks seem to work. It also is a way of creating ketones in my body that I would develop in the morning because I'm still fasting. When I travel and I don't know exactly what's going to happen in terms of meals, I do have breakfast and typically for example this morning I had a three egg omelet with spinach and onions and mushrooms covered generously with pure extra virgin olive oil. I want to just say, so there's the added fat. When you are eating at restaurants and traveling, you've got to be very careful because most of the time I have found what they serve in terms of olive oil isn't really true olive oil. So as strange as it may be, we often travel with olive oil. We're dedicated to that. And typically I have at least one meal a day which is plant-based. I think that's good for my health. I think it's actually the right thing to do for the planet. I used to argue that you could have all of your foods be omnivorous, eating animal products throughout the day. I think that the data does show that if we were to all commit to one meal a day being plant-based, it would have a huge impact on the planet. I think ultimately it's a good way of getting dietary fiber into your system, which is good for your gut bacteria.

The word meditation literally means to become familiar with. If you look at the symbolism of it and you look it up, it's familiarization. So you sit down and you say, okay, I don't want to be unhappy. I don't want to be angry. I don't want to talk trash about people. I don't want to complain. I want to blame. I don't want to make excuses. I don't want to feel lack. I don't want to have an attitude that's telling me I can't. It's too hard. That's the old identity, right? So the moment you start becoming conscious of those unconscious thoughts, the moment you become aware of your automatic habits and behaviors, the moment you can notice that this is actually guilt that you're feeling or sadness or pain. The moment you can become conscious and familiar with those states of mind and body, if you keep becoming familiar with it, if you keep becoming conscious of it, you won't go unconscious. Sitting in a meditation to know thyself, most people all of a sudden, here comes the barrage of thoughts, here comes the propensities and habits, and here comes the emotions. The body's saying, you, normally complain at this time. What are you doing, sitting with your eyes closed? Let's think of a reason why you can complain, and the body starts influencing the mind. If you break it down for a person to understand, how many times do we have to forget until we start remembering and keep remembering and stop forgetting? That's the process of change. So then you put a person in a meditation and they hear that voice, they hear that chatter, they want to get up and go to the bathroom, they want to check their cell phone, they want to feel angry. And instead of getting up and saying, I can't meditate, See, they're coming to the end of the known. So they want to go back to what's known, right? If you teach the person what to do and you show them that on the other side of that is freedom, on the other side of that is joy, you got to become so conscious and it takes a lot of awareness, it takes a lot of energy to sit with yourself long enough to disentangle from those programs. Now, we now know that it's a formula, that if you follow a formula, you will actually start pruning circuitry. You'll stop the conditioning process and move the body out of the past and it starts liberating energy. That's energy to heal with, that's energy to create a new life, that's energy to digest again. The body's no longer living in survival or living in emergency. The majority of people's emotions then tend to be derived from the hormones of stress. We started realizing that the arousal of the stress hormones the rush of the chemistry is actually tapping the body's resources and the stronger the emotions we feel towards any problem or person in our life, the more we pay attention to them. And if where you place your attention is where you place your energy, then you're giving your power away to that person or problem. And if a person can learn to sit in the fire and say, it's not my boss, it's not my ex, it's not my job, it's not the pandemic, it's me. That this emotion isn't serving me because this emotion is the exact emotion that's pushing the genetic buttons that's creating disease. Okay, if I can keep practicing lowering the volume to that emotion, I'll keep taking my attention off that person or problem. And in a sense, the body starts moving back where into the present moment. It starts getting relaxed in the unknown. So we started teaching people the process. and by a person overcoming their past, not the trauma, just the emotion. They just have to work on breaking that conditioning process because if you keep doing it over and over again, a habit is when the body becomes the mind. Now the servant, now the body's influencing the mind. So, you teach a person then how to break that conditioning process. The body starts moving into the present moment. It's no longer in the same environmental condition and then all of a sudden, we start to see some pretty dramatic changes in people's health.

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable what you're talking about is helping people understand that the voice in their head is not them.

It's a program.

Who is it that's actually aware that you have a voice in your head?

That's the person we're after.

They call that witness consciousness or non-judgmental awareness or whatever they call this.

Mindfulness.

Mindfulness.

Yes.

And honestly, Joe, it's scary in there. Your lower self has literally hijacked the road trip. And for me, I'm constantly in relationship to my lower self, trying to see what it's saying, trying to shift the dialogue and flip it so that I'm not constantly repeating these same negative thought patterns that are causing me unhappiness or suffering or disease or pain or whatever it is. And I've been working on this for a long time. I don't find it easy. I find it challenging. it's like, it's a four in the morning, my mind just kicks up about, you know, my ex-wife or like, you know, and I'm like, I'm like pretty chill most of the time. I'm like, God, it's just, it's so deep in this wiring and programming and, and your work really helps people with a methodology to, to deal with that.

Right.

And, and, and what, what happens in the work that you've done is so tremendous is that not only do you see the changes in people's lives, but you're seeing changes in their biology, which speak to the underlying physiology of joy, happiness, freedom, right? That's a very new thing. You're familiar, I'm sure, with my friend Daniel Goleman and his partner, Davidson, Rich Davidson, who wrote altered traits about studying these Olympic meditators who've been in caves for nine years meditating all the time, and their brains look totally different. And you're seeing this not in nine years of being in a cave, but.

After seven days, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, God, if you were to ask me, Mark, a year ago or two years ago, if I would think in my lifetime that I would be seeing what we're seeing in our measurements, I'd probably say, Wow, probably not, but it's pretty ambitious because sometimes we see such levels of order in our communities' brains when they when they apply that formula, that we just found the articles that said that the mathematical probability of this type of coherence happening in the brain is statistically impossible and if it occurred, it would occur as a momentary phenomenon that's random. Our collective groups of people are sustaining these states for extended periods of time. We can see dramatic changes in people's brain circuitry, but not only their circuitry, but this thing called coherence. Coherence is order, it's rhythm. The antithesis is if you're living in stress and you're living in survival, you feel like you can't control something, you feel like you can't predict something, and you have the perception that something's getting worse. The arousal of those stress hormones causes you to shift your attention from one person to another problem, to another thing, to another place. every one of those elements has a neurological network in the brain. The arousal and the brain is saying there's an emergency, try to control everything, try to predict everything, prepare for the worst, and you start firing all these circuits individually. You shift your attention to your boss, to your co-workers or whatever, and you start causing the brain to fire very incoherently. When the brain is incoherent, we're incoherent. When the brain isn't working right, we're not working right. The arousal causes us to narrow our focus on the material world. Our senses become heightened and we focus on everything that's physical and material and we start over-focusing. That's what stress does. So we thought, what if we taught people to do the opposite? Instead of narrowing their focus on whatever is material or known to them, let's have them open their focus and broaden their focus and put their attention on nothing physical and put it on nothing. on space, on energy. And if we can create what's called a divergent focus, is it possible that the brain would begin to fire more coherently? And all of a sudden we started seeing the front of the brain talking the back of the brain and synchronizing areas together and what sinks in the brain links in the brain, and all of a sudden you see the person starting to feel more whole. You keep doing that, more coherence creates more energy. The waves start standing and they start building on each other, and when that happens, There's an arousal that ultimately takes place in the brain, but the arousal is not fear, the arousal is not pain or aggression, and the arousal is not anger. The arousal is ecstasy, the arousal is bliss, the arousal is love.

It sounds pretty good.

And the person who signs up... The cool part about it is that when that occurs, the stimulation that's being created, and we see these high gamma patterns that are off the scale, The arousal that's taking place is not taking place from anything out there in the environment. It's not taking place from the sports car, the wardrobe, or the movie, or the cell phone. It's happening inside the person and all of a sudden that's a new feeling. They've never had that feeling before and they start feeling connected. The side effect of that is even greater levels of order in the brain and all of a sudden the heart gets very turned on, it gets very signaled and the person is moving into an elevated state and that kind of combination of energy between the heart and the brain causes the person to become creative, not a little creative, but really seeing possibilities. They're conscious of things they were never conscious before, and that's a greater level of awareness, and that's a greater level of energy. And so people all of a sudden start seeing synchronicities that start taking place in their life because they have a coherent brain and a coherent heart. and you got a Wi-Fi signal and you feel connected to something. You don't feel separate. Stress causes us to feel separation and lack. And this feeling makes you feel whole and all of a sudden all the things that you wanted because you were in lack, you no longer want because you feel like you have them. That's the kind of place where you can relax more into the present moment and enjoy the sunset and enjoy the meal and enjoy the conversation and enjoy the connection because you're present. And I say that that's a skill.

It is really, and our whole society is geared to make us not present. I mean, the phones that we have are just these distraction animals. I think it's hard for us to come back to ourselves. And I remember, I'm old enough to remember when we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have computers, we didn't have anything except postcards and a landline. And I remember the quality of my experience was quite different. and the quality of my inner joy was much higher. And, you know, I'm sort of inspired by what you're saying. And I decided, actually last week, that I'm going to go for a month into a cabin somewhere where I'm going to have food delivered, not see another human, and go into a retreat and meditate and have no phone, no computer, no books. I'm not even going to take your books, Joe. I'm going to take a pen and paper so I can write, but that's it. and it'll just be an interesting experiment to see what it feels like to just be with no distraction and to let all that settle and, and begin to get into the space of coherence. Because, you know, I've noticed that for myself, and I'm sure, like everybody else, that, you know, the, the mind is a hard monkey to tame, and, and it takes us down Pathways of beliefs and ideas and things that take us away from a vibrant, full, joyous, happy life. And what's great about your work is it's not just theoretical. And yes, you've got all the science behind it and you're really mapping out the changes that structurally happen in our bodies. But you talk about these four elements of healing your body with your mind and how we can rewire our brain by changing our thoughts. I mean, so it sort of implies that we have the capacity to master our thoughts, which a lot of us don't agree to. But can you take us what those four were.

Well, first of all, I want to respond to that because a lot of people don't know what to do when they have that thought. They have no formula that's scientific and practical that if they can practice enough times, if nerve cells that fire together wire together, the nerve cells that no longer fire together and no longer wire together. And if you stick with it, and we can tell you this, that sooner or later that thought is going to start to have a weakening effect on your mind until ultimately it's no longer going to be there because you no longer paid attention to it, no longer accepted it, no longer believed it, no longer surrendered to it. And most people, when they get to this point, Mark, they think, I'm doing my meditation wrong. And I always tell them, No, no, no, no, no. You're actually doing it right. That's what I want you to see. That's staying in the way between you and your happiness. On the other side of that is a whole new area that you get to wire your brain any way you choose. So then there's an unlearning process before the relearning process. There's a breaking a habit of the old self and a reinvention of a new self. You got to prune synaptic connections and then got to practice sprouting new ones. You got to un-fire and un-wire. You got to re-fire and rewire. You got to deprogram and reprogram. You got to lose your mind and create a new one. And you have to unmemorize emotions that keep you connected to the same familiar past and then recondition the body to a new mind and to a new emotion. So then that process, if there's a formula to apply, let's just say, yeah, you sitting in your meditation, it means.

It sounds good, right? But how do you get from here to there? I'm sure everybody's listening.

But everybody's done it. They've done it. They just haven't made it a habit. And so then, if you're sitting in a meditation and you have something to do and your body starts going, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, it's my ex-wife, it's my whatever, and you go like this to your body. Okay, okay, now listen, you settle down and you know exactly what to do and you tame the animal, you tell it to settle, stay, and you relax it back into the present moment. What I want you to know.

Down, sit.

That'S a victory. That's a victory. And then if the body starts going, I gotta get up, I gotta check my cell phone, I gotta go, I gotta meeting, I'm busy. And you notice that your body's habituated into the same predictable future and you settle your body back down into the present moment. Now you're executing a will that's greater than those unconscious programs, and that's a victory. And if you keep doing this over and over again, just like training an animal, The body's going to stay, it's going to surrender to a new mind, and when that occurs, there's a liberation of energy and the person relaxes into the present moment. That's the unknown. The familiar past is the known. The predictable future is the known. The only one place left is the sweet spot of that generous present moment. Now let's get the person so familiar with their unconscious thoughts that when it comes they don't respond to them, so aware of their habits and behaviors, so so conscious of the emotions that they typically feel on a waking day, they would never go unconscious to that emotion again. And you say to the person, Hey Mark, what thoughts do you want to fire and wire in your brain? And with intention and attention, if we showed you how to do that, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. Just take a little repetition, a little presence, you start installing the hardware. Keep doing it. It's going to become a software program. What does that mean? That's going to be the new voice in your head that says, Mark, you can do it. If you said, okay, I could teach.

My inner voice to speak a different language.

Exactly. You can change, you can change the smile. But then they want to start Portuguese.

Because I think it's a nice sounding language. But have you then said? It's a very sexy language. I think Portuguese is very sexy.

But if you said then, okay, how am I gonna be with my coworkers? How am I gonna be with my employees? How am I gonna be with my ex-wife? What would greatness look like today? And you sat down and closed your eyes and you rehearsed in your mind how you were gonna be in every one of those situations. If you study the research in neuroscience, mental rehearsal installs neurological hardware in your brain to look like you already did it.

I think about my serve before I serve and I do it better because.

You produce that mind. So if you keep doing that, you install hardware, practice it and rehearse it, it becomes a software program which means you start behaving that way. Now here's the challenging part. Can you teach your body emotionally what the future reality that you want to live in feels like before it happens? Now this is Very difficult if you've been conditioned into believing something in your outer world has to change to take away the emptiness or the lack, to make you feel differently. This is saying actually feel the emotion before it happens and don't wait for the experience to occur. Teach your body what the feeling will be before it occurs. If the environment signals the gene and the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion, you're signaling the gene ahead of the environment and genes make proteins and proteins are responsible for the structure and function of your body and the expression of proteins is the expression of life. So teach the body emotionally to self-regulate to believe it's living in an environment that's flourishing. That's wonderful. Keep practicing it and it'll become familiar to you and the process then creates a new identity and it's not difficult once you understand what you're doing and why you're doing it and the more you combine all those different branches of science and make in a simple way to understand. If people understand the what and the why, the how gets easier because you can assign meaning to what you're doing and it becomes instrumental. So get a group of people, a thousand people, 1,500 people, 2,000 people into a room, teach them that information, whether they're coming for wealth, their health, a relationship, a new career, a mystical experience, get them all together and teach them and measure what can take place in a one-week period of time. And I assure you that's more than 75% of the people that go through and go all in and retreat from their lives and remove the same stimulation from their environment and not be in the same conditions and teach them that information and give them numerous opportunities to apply it and numerous opportunities to get beyond themselves. All you need is that first person that stands on the stage and says, Hey, I walked in here with Parkinson's disease. I have no idea what happened. I'm not trembling anymore and boy, that last thing just something clicked for me and the person in the audience was watching the four-minute mile right in front of them and going, wow, that guy looks like he's not a vegan. He doesn't look like he's particularly in shape, but his Parkinson's went away and wow, I mean, if he could do it, I could do it and somebody else changes their belief and now that's a footprint in consciousness. Get enough people doing that, by the end of the week you're going to see things... We've seen blind people seeing, deaf people hearing, not once, not twice, we've seen people with strokes for 10 years, lift their arms up again. We've seen people step out of wheelchairs, people on crutches, drop their crutches. I mean, you see the body literally recalibrates to a new mind and they're not intentionally trying to do anything. They're just becoming somebody else. But the process of overcoming is the process of becoming. And if you teach people that formula and you get just one or two people, doing it, it's just going to become an infection and it's going to, wellness is going to spread just like disease.

That's good. Yeah, yeah, I think health is contagious actually. So, Joe, a lot of people listening are going, yeah, this all makes sense and, and I'm certainly having these thoughts, but taming the mind is hard and, and a lot of us feel things and have really strong emotions and we think that, that they have a existence of their own. But, it's really the thoughts that create emotions, right? It's thoughts that create the feelings. Because we have a belief, we have perspective, we have a narrative, and it can happen in a nanosecond, right? It can happen in a nanosecond, but is that how it works?

Well, as you said at the beginning of the show, there's never a time where your body is an influence in your mind, and there's never a time where your mind is an influence in your body. You have a body in your mind and a mind mapped in your brain, and it's the same. So, a person then who's become so happy being unhappy, that that familiar feeling in them is something that they enjoy feeling because they don't know who they would be if they didn't feel that feeling. Okay, let's talk about that.

A lot of six people you see that without their illness or their identity and without it, you don't know who they are. And why?

Why? The suffering, and I'm not saying this is for everybody, but that person gets attention from it, gets people to visit, gets whatever they need. But in a sense, they also have relationships where they love to share the same emotions. And if you share the same experiences, you share the same emotions. So, Mark, let's get on the phone and let's complain for the next 30 minutes about how miserable life is. And then I'll try to top you and you try to top me. And we're using each other. to reaffirm some type of conditioning, right? So that becomes the identity.

So.

Then, let's just say you decide to stop blaming, stop complaining, stop making excuses, stop feeling sorry for yourself, stop talking trash, stop commiserating. You just say, I'm going to quit that. In the first hour, you do really well. But the problem is the body's saying, Hey, Mark, this is what you've been.

Complaining about in an hour.

Yeah, this is what you call Joe and you start commiserating. So what does the body say? The body starts influencing the mind and it starts calling up circuits in the brain that are connected to that emotion that you've been using all along. So then you start thinking about all the reasons you're unhappy. Now that thought leads to a choice. That choice leads to the same behavior. The same behavior creates the same experience and the same experience produces the same feeling and the same emotion and that same emotion starts to influence the very same thought. and now the person returns back to their same biology. The health condition will always be there because it's the environment that looks like it's signaling the genes. But it's the emotion. If the person all of a sudden says, okay, I'm going to do my meditation and you do your meditation at 11 o'clock in the morning, and that's normally when you get on your emails and start judging people, your body's going to say you're out of schedule. So the process of change requires then not only addressing the mind, which is the thought, but also the emotion that's conditioned into the body. And if you break it down for people, they'll be able to distinguish in the process of change, oh my God, like I'm fasting from a breaking addiction. You know, your body's craving, just I just gotta suffer a little bit with somebody and it wants to suffer. you got to be able to work with it. And not just to sit there and white-knuckle it, to learn how to self-regulate, to learn how to make those changes with your eyes open. That's when it matters the most. You practice meditation with your eyes closed. You take your body out for a test drive during the day with your eyes open and you work on staying conscious, right?

I mean, right. The purpose of meditation is to get.

Better at meditation, to get better at life, right? Exactly. Exactly.

Becoming more conscious. Exactly.

Yeah.

And so those four elements that you.

Talked about, A little bit, can you kind of... Yes, so it's really simple. So the first thing is that people had this very strong belief that there was some innate intelligence within them that was giving them life. There was some energy, some force of life that made them more vitalistic and less mechanistic. Whether it was spiritual, whatever they wanted to call it, that there was some power within them that they acknowledged that was giving them life. The second thing was they realized it was their own mismanagement of their thoughts and their actions and their emotions that created their health condition. They realized I actually had a strong part in this and they started taking responsibility and really started they decided I got to break the habit of being myself. Now, they really said, if I'm going to live the next part of my life with this health condition, I don't want to live like that person any longer. If I only have six months to live, I don't want to live that way. So they started becoming conscious of their unconscious self and so conscious that they didn't want to go unconscious. And then they started thinking, number three, if I actually had a new lease on life, if I actually could heal, if I actually could live another year, how would I live my life? Now they didn't say, I'm going to be the same person. They said, How do I want to think? How do I want to act? How do I want to feel? Exactly how I described, they went into an inward process, not even a meditation, just what do I want to tell myself? Let me repeat it, how do I want to live with my family? How do I want to eat dinner? What emotions do I want to feel? And they started changing their personality. They started reinventing a new self. And then the last thing that they had in common is that they started noticing when they would close their eyes and do this, they lost track of space and time. that they thought it was like 15 minutes that went by or 20 minutes that went by. And in actuality, it was an hour and 20 minutes that went by. They had no sense of space and time in their inner process. And I was interested in demystifying the process because I wanted to see if we could teach that process that worked with sick people on other people and it worked.

So, you're taking these ancient spiritual traditions and meditation and spiritual practices and you put a lot of structure and science behind it to help the average Westerner who's not familiar with those practices to actually access it, which is really an extraordinary gift. And, I'd love to sort of have you talk about some of the practical things that people can do, like gratitude. You talk about how there's 1,200 chemicals released in the body from the practice of gratitude.

Yeah.

And, and, and again, you know, I'd be scared to know how many molecules come out with the practice of stress and complaining. I don't want to know that.

You know what?

I want to talk about the Gratitude, the biology of gratitude.

Yeah. So I studied this extensively because we actually, we took, we did an experiment. We took a group of people that were, came to our event, and we did all kinds of brain measurements on them, and then we put HR heart rate variability. devices on them. We asked them to trade emotions like fear or anger or resentment or impatience or frustration and stop feeling those feelings and just for a few times a day to feel gratitude and we would talk them through it just for 15 minutes, 10 or 15 minutes, two or three times a day. At the end of four days, we were looking to measure if there were any significant changes in their immune regulation and we found out that the body started producing 50% more of a chemical called IGA, immunoglobulin A, the body's natural antiviral, antibacterial, natural flu shot. And so, when you are receiving something favorable or you just receive something enjoyable, if something wonderful just happened to you or something really amazing is happening to you, you feel grateful. So, the emotional signature of gratitude is something amazing is happening to you or it just happened to you, right? So, it's the ultimate state of receiving emotionally. So, if you can teach a person to truly practice gratitude, there'll be significant changes in the way their heart thumps, the way it beats, and what it starts to do to the brain. We've studied this thousands of times. So, when you start feeling grateful, your heart starts beating in a rhythm that begins to influence or inform the brain that it's safe to create. It's believing in that moment that it's safe to be out of survival and practice that enough times, the body starts to regenerate. So we saw changes in immune regulation, we saw changes in gene expression. Why? Because the body's believing it's living in an environment where the person's dreams have already happened. We only accept, believe and surrender to thoughts that are equal to our emotional state. We never accept, believe and surrender to thoughts that are not equal to our emotional state and this is why affirmations don't work. You could say, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. And your body's going, no, you're not. You're miserable. So the thought never makes it past the brainstem to the body. Teach a person to change from fear and break that conditioning and practice with enough times creating the same feeling of gratitude as automatically as they did with fear. It makes sense then that in a very short amount of time you can see very significant changes in how the body regulates and how it functions and the heart then starts to beat in this beautiful, beautiful coherent state. And so we started looking to see if teaching people how to do that and sustaining it, if it made significant changes. And without a doubt, when we accept, believe and surrender to the thoughts that are equal to the emotional state of gratitude, that information programs the autonomic nervous system into a different destiny. So then teach a person how to be in a state of receivership and gratitude, they can program their brain and body a lot quicker than when they're feeling fear and anger because you get the diagnosis. The moment you get the diagnosis, you notice a change in your internal state. You're changed. When you notice that change in your internal state, the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot. That's called a long-term memory. The doctor says, you, have six months to live. You have this condition. This is what happened. All that information is going in because it's equal to the emotion of fear. and get the person out of that state because that's a state of survival and you're losing energy in the body. And in gratitude, you're regenerating energy. So get the person to a state of gratitude and then teach them how to program their brain and body. Then you start seeing changes in their autonomic nervous system.

If you love that last video, you should check out the next one for sure on getting to the root cause of all disease. So imagine 36 holes in a roof. You can cover one hole, it doesn't really help you that much.

So we want to be able to.

Address all of the different holes.

And when we started doing that, we realized it actually.